Sadhana of Feeling

Feelings have been a difficult subject for me. I always felt everything strongly, until I decided not to feel anything, because it was just completely too overwhelming for me.

So I spent decades not feeling, and you can just imagine how life becomes when your inner GPS system is not on. I was drifting. All the unfelt feelings piled up like unused compost at the back of your yard.

But the day came when the floodgates opened, and it was just a tsunami. So I welcomed feeling back.

If I had to name my most important spiritual practice, it would not be meditation, prayer, yoga, or any particular tradition.

It would be feeling.

Not understanding what I feel. Not analyzing it. Not even necessarily being able to name it.

Feeling it.

I have spent a lot of time trying to find words for my inner world. Words have helped me tremendously. They give form to something that otherwise remains invisible. But lately I have been seeing more clearly where language ends.

I cannot think my way into what I am.

There is something underneath language that I recognize as more fundamental than any story I can tell about myself. Before I say grief, there is a movement in my body. Before love, fear, longing, joy, there is the direct experience of something moving through me.

Feeling is not something I do in order to know myself. It is the direct way I experience being alive.

And increasingly, one of the ways I experience God. Because for me, God is Life itself, pulsing in my veins.

When I am alone, some of my deepest experiences of connection with God happen when I allow myself to feel without trying to make anything out of it. There may be tears. There may be trembling, warmth, laughter, emptiness, something completely without a name.

It doesn’t need a name to be real.

There is something deeply devotional in simply allowing Life to move through me.

Feeling itself can become prayer.

Recently my friend Dom guided me through a heart meditation.

He spoke about the spiritual heart, not the physical organ, but the subtle field around the heart space, and invited me to experience what happens when the heart is not directed toward another person, but remains open and oriented toward Source.

Something about it completely disarmed me.

We were sitting together in a very vulnerable field of feeling, hearts open, but neither heart reaching toward the other as its destination. And strangely, this did not create distance.

It created intimacy. I felt extraordinarily safe and open.

Relief. Tingling. Laughter. When the lower doors of the heart seemed to open, I felt it all the way down into the soles of my feet. At the same time, there was an opening upward.

A circuit opening. Energy moving.

Nothing needing to be held.

It made me contemplate protection in an entirely different way.

What if some of what I have called protection has actually been a way of closing myself off from the Divine field?

Closing makes sense when some part of us believes it is not safe. We build walls, armor, filters. We try to decide what is ours and what belongs to someone else. We try to control what enters and what leaves.

But an open heart does not mean everything gets access to me.

Openness is not the absence of boundaries.

I can say no with an open heart. I can leave with an open heart. I can feel another person deeply without becoming responsible for what they feel. I can experience something moving through a shared field without immediately deciding what it means or whose it is.

This has changed something in the way I understand my sensitivity too.

I have often thought that feeling deeply means needing more protection, not letting people or places influence me.

Now I am curious about the opposite.

What if hypersensitivity becomes a problem especially when the circuit is closed?

When there is nowhere for what I feel to move, everything accumulates inside me. Every sensation becomes something to process, identify, manage, or defend against.

But when the circuit is open, feeling can move. Through the body, resonating in the heart, bringing me back into Life.

Like water running over the feathers of a bird. Fully touched, without having to hold everything that touches me.

This also illuminated something about human connection for me.

I feel closest to people with whom feeling is allowed and all the “have to’s” cease to exist.

Not performed. Not extracted. Not immediately analyzed or fixed.

Allowed.

There is something profoundly intimate about being with another human being who can stay present when something moves. Someone who does not need to turn it into a problem, rush to give it meaning, or “do something about it.”

We can simply meet what is here.

Sometimes I don’t even think it is necessary to know immediately whether a feeling is yours or mine.

Can we feel it before we explain it? Is it welcome to sit down and have tea with us?

Can something that has been offline for a very long time finally be allowed to return?

Welcome home.